In the past i've been successful in evangalizing free
software because i've been in small companies where a voice
could be heard and reasoned argument pondered. Alas, i'm
now in a big company and keep running into brick walls.

i've put together a set of scripts for watching HA
systems (Veritas First Watch) for anomolies and reporting
it's findings. Every time i bring up freeing it (to let
other groups help improve/port it, to expose it to wider use
(stress testing), or just to improve the ability to recruit
people ('hey, look at us, we work on free software')) i run
into blank stares and replies like 'Well, I really don't
know who we'd even talk to about doing that.' . . . There
has to be a way, I just can't find it.

i'm also working on a ticketing/to-do system. It's in
production use here, but could really stand having other
groups pick it up and tweak, abuse, and play with it.

If anyone has ideas about how to break through the
organizational stasis field, I'd love to hear them.

All of the above are done with MySQL and Perl
and provide an HTML interface for the user, just in case
anyone cares.

just a quick note about evil user interfaces ... i'm
spending the day 'learning' how to support a hardware
encryption box. The vendor has an interesting
interface for displaying error codes -- they use a single
LED that flashes morse code.

Hmm, mjs certified me as an
apprentice, thanks. In
attempt to prove that he's over-rated me, i thought i'd put
some musings here. i don't think these are worthy of an
article, but hopefully they're not too foolish ...

what i do:

well, i'm pretty pathetic as a coder. although i'm
starting to do things that approach real work in perl.
mostly, i'm a unix/network admin. i've been preaching the
Free Software gospel for a while, and even seen it pay off a
time or two.

my thoughts for today:

1) why does everyone who writes an intro to using sh
derived shells (esp bash) avoid talking about functions? i
got hit with another intro article yesterday, and in a fit
of insanity put this together.

2) Within a community, it should be possible to build
not just a trust
metric , but an interest metric as well. I'm not talking
about a
content filter, rather a method
for
bringing people, articles, and perhaps external links
regarding areas
of personal interest to a higher level of visibility to the
individual
user. I'm not sure of the exact method, but would like to
think aloud
for a bit and see if I spark any ideas with the rest of you.

At the root, my thought is that several (perhaps 20) key
terms could
be identified, each having potentially several synonyms.
Then every
page a user visits, creates, or links to would be scored
according to
their use of those terms. A page being visited would be
worth a low
value to the reader for any terms it contains, a page that
the user
wrote would be worth more, and a page the user linked to
would be
worth still more (perhaps values of .01, .25, and .35
respectively).
This attempts to reflect the increased interest in a field
represented
by the effort to write about it, or create a link to it.

Some mechanism for aging probably makes sense, maybe
totaling a
persons 'interest matrix' on a daily basis and determining
their
current interest with a moving average. Again, I'm not
sure.

The net result of this is that each person would have an
interest
matrix, which could be used to weight objects for
presentation to them
when they've logged into the site. As a person sees more
contributions in areas s/he is most interested in, they are
likely to
identify the people involved in creating them and responding
to them
... hopefully encouraging more communication within the
sub-group.

Good places to look for implementation ideas would
probably include
the news weighting system in Emacs (GNUS?), and the scoring
mechanism
used by ht:\dig or other search engines.

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